19-year-old sings through brain surgery to protect musical talents

Nov 28, 2018 21:10 IST

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A teenage girl sang her way through brain surgery in order for doctors to preserve her musical talent. 19-year-old Kira Laconetti has been singing and performing for most of her life, but four years ago the self-taught musician began noticing something strange when she sang or listened to music, an issue that became increasingly frequent. The teenager from Lynden, Washington, USA, said: “It was as if a light switched off in my brain.” “Suddenly I was tone deaf – I couldn’t process the words in time with the music and I couldn’t sing.” Finding a marble-sized mass in the right temporal lobe of her brain, doctors confirmed that a benign tumour was triggering a rare disorder called musicogenic epilepsy – a condition where seizures are triggered by certain types of music or even frequencies of pitch for which the person’s brain has a low tolerance for.